count cells with specified character (Office 20

Hi,

This is my first time to use this board so I hope I post this properly. In former years I did computer programming in such languages as FORTRAN, BASIC, and PASCAL. Now I'm trying to learn Excel and things I would have thought simple are baffling me.

Here's my problem:

I have a column of cells, each of which contains a short text string. I want to count how many cells have a given character and display this number in another cell at the top of the column as shown below:

I want cells B1 through B5 to contain the formulas to count the number of cells (within the range B6-B12) that contain a specified character. But I haven't been able to design a formula that works. I thought the COUNTIF function would work in conjunction with one of the text functions, but I'm stuck. Am I going beyond what can be done with Excel or am I overlooking something?